In this series of articles I want to explain how to configure a simple Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) process using DevOps and TFVC as an alternative to Github into Power Platform context.
I will show that by creating two simple Azure Pipelines: the first move the solutions from source to destination environment and the second store both the .zip solutions file and unpacked solution artifacts into TFVC Source Control.
In this first article I cover all related to the configuration through the following steps.
Step 1 – Power Platform Environments
In order to simulate the process, I created two sandbox environments into the Power Platform, Source that I used as DEV and Destination used as QUALITY.
Step 2 – Azure DevOps Project
To manage the process and the automations, I created a new DevOps project with Azure Pipelines feature enabled.
Step 3 – Azure DevOps Extensions
To set up the ALM process is mandatory to install extensions into DevOps organization:
Power Platform Build Tools Extension is official Microsoft extension used to interact with Power Platform environments
TFVC Build Tasks Extension to interact with TFVC Source Control system
Both extensions are free.
4 – Azure DevOps Service Connections
The last step is to create the connections into DevOps to the Power Platform environments. In this case I have created two connections, one point to the Source environment and one point to the Destination environment.
Both use a Power Platfom type, already available in DevOps.
Also, both use a MFA authentication. Note, that for this step you must create and register an App under Azure Active Directory to manage the connection to the environment. For both enviroment this App must be added as Application Users with System Administrator role.
Now that everything is configured, in the next article I will show you the first Azure Pipeline that will move the solution containing the customizations from the Source to the Destination environment.
Hope it helps and happy 365Power’ing!
Danilo Capuano 